Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @10:52AM
from the take-a-look-at-this dept.

siliconbits writes "After having hacked Rupert Murdoch's flagship news website, thesun.co.uk, and redirecting its readers to a spoof front page and pilfering its email servers, Anonymous' unofficial mouthpiece, Sabu, has revealed that the group is 'sitting on [the sun's & NOTW's] emails' with a press release from Anonymous & possibly more coming in a few hours. While that website has already been taken down, the email bounty is likely to be potentially more damaging with Sabu releasing details of two of the Sun's top three employees, Rebekah Wade and Bill Akass, the former editors of the Sun and News of the World respectively as well as Lee Wells & Danny Rogers, Editorial Support Manager at News International and Sun Online Editorial Manager respectively, as a taster of what's coming next."

I wonder if Anon and Lulzlzlz (what the fuck ever) realize that they are and have been doing the very same thing they are pissed at The Sun for doing. They just have different targets that in their minds, deserve it.

Maybe. I do think that in a technical sense you're totally right. But in a political sense, releasing these emails is perhaps more akin to releasing the state dept cables. This release is going to change the way the police and politicians are able to cover this whole thing up. It's going to open the door on far more scrutiny from "legitimate press and blog" investigators, who may be able to hold wrongdoers in the emails to account publicly and therefore eventually legally.

Actually, I think it is more severe to hack and release the emails of a company/person facing both civil and criminal charges/actions.

Now all the internal email and communications that could be subpoenaed to discover the depth of this scandal and criminal or civil liability can be questioned for it's legitimacy. after all, their servers were hacked and some activist group had complete control over them for an unspecified period of time in which they covered their tracks making it difficult to know exactly what they did while in control of it.

So in court, it would go like this, well, MR CEO, did you tell the reporter to hack the voice mail as is stated in this document? You Honor, I have never ordered anyone to do anything of the sort, it was not a company policy and if it was know, the people responsible would have been reported to the authorities and terminated, that accusation is a fabrication created by an activist group calling itself anonymous who hacked our servers and planted evidence of what they wanted the case to become.

But the investigators have this email sent from your computer. Well, your honor, those documents were retrieved by investigators after the activist group had illegally accessed our servers and one of our IT staff showed us how these headers and identifying information can be fabricated like in this example that looks very realistic as if it was an email you sent under your court email account but from a Disney world resort 3000 miles away and 5 minute into the future from now. IF this was planted on the courts servers by an activist group, would it be evidence that you went to Orlando Florida instead of presiding over this hearing?

The judge would then order the evidence after the break in unreliable unless supported by something the activist group did not hack into. This would likely result in only low level employees who admitted to the deeds getting into trouble.

So by that reasoning it's ok for someone to go around beating people up because you suspect them of being corrupt but it's not ok to beat someone up because of their color, or gender, or color of the hair or because you were paid to?

Absolutely! Vigilante justice, while illegal and inappropriate where there is a legitimate justice system, is unequivocally morally superior to racially-motivated hate crimes. Do you really even have to ask this question?

The phone hackers destroyed no property, deprived no owners of any of its use. I don't think there is any real harm here. As far the policing thinking that little girl might still have been alive, come on if she was dialing into her voice mail they should be all over the phone records to find out where from, the real story there is BAD POLICE work. Information wants to be free any secret you keep you have to work against entropy to keep that information concentrated with you otherwise it will diffuse. If you don't put energy into doing that then it will diffuse. IMHO its not News of the Worlds fault people selected weak voice mail PINs, its their fault.

More like evidence was tampered.

First, listening to voicemail often clears the "new voicemail" flag, and unless you're really anal, no one listens to every voice mail they have daily.

Perhaps the bigger crime is the fact they destroyed evidence - the voice mailbox was full. They deleted voicemails to make room for more. Sure we can hope the reporters deleted the unimportant ones, but can you really be sure?

Lulzsec at least isn't tampering with these things - these emails exist, and they're releasing it. They haven't come in, deleted emails or read unread email (and fail to reset them so the recipient never notices they haven't actually read the email yet).

Yes, there were mistakes on all sides. But leaving my front door unlocked doesn't give anyone the right to enter my house, and especially not to go through my computer reading my email, answering machine/voice mail

But the contents of the emails may now be in question. Lulzsec could just as easily plant emails as read them... It may just cause people to have to go back to tape but anything not backed-up could have its authenticity in question.

Also, don't forget one of the biggest accusations of illegal activity was that it appears that the police were bribed by representatives of Murdoch Corp.
We'll see how that portion comes out in court, but it appears that it might have gone all the way to the top, hence the resignations of the chief of Scotland Yard.
We may see even more as apparently, one of the editors of the News of the World during the time of the phone hacking/alleged bribery went to join the Prime Minister's cabinet.

Ah, it's not okay then. Even if they just look around and don't touch anything?

Wellll you know it's interesting - I think it was stupid for LS to get into this business, but I'd rather have them doing it, in general, than not. Maybe it's the honesty of the thing? They cop to it immediately, often before it is discovered by other means. Certainly they're assholes, but I'd rather have groups like this charging into the shadows of potential wrongdoing than wait for justice from a system riddled with corruption. What happens next is someone starts poisoning the data, and then things becom

What about:1) Hacking the phones of the police officers investigating the phone hacking case?2) Bribing police officers for information on those same officers.3) Blackmailing some of those officers with information obtained by 1) and 2).4) Bribing the officers they couldn't blackmail in 3 to drop the case.5) Hacking the phones of politicians.6) Bribing police (and doctors?) for information on politicians.7) Using the information gained in 5) and 6) to dictate favorable legislation.8) Using his control of diverse news media to interfere with elections.9) Using the threat of interference to influence politicians

There's a lot more to this case than just the phone hacking. Picking on "regular people" is what outraged a lot of people, but now they might actually pay attention to the other, more important, stuff.

Murdoch's employees, owing to Murdoch's leadership, believed they lived in a world where laws against hacking and bribing didn't exist, and therefore hacked everyone they were curious about and bribed everyone they were not curious about, in the common goal of gathering salacious information about people they were curious about. And they also believed they lived in a world where blackmail was not illegal, so once they had this curious information, they felt no reason not to use it, even if it meant the man

The phone hackers destroyed no property, deprived no owners of any of its use. I don't think there is any real harm here.

NO HARM?! In case you missed the details of the original case that started the whole firestorm...In 2002, Milly Dowler was kidnapped, then murdered later. When she went missing, News of the World hacked her phone. Seeing her voice mailbox was full, they deleted some messages (deleting potential evidence) so they could maybe get some new information. Meanwhile, the police saw that 'Milly' accessed her phone mailbox, so they downgraded her case, treating her as a low priority runaway. That meant that critical time tracking her was lost that could've got the police to her sooner and potentially saved her life.

A Whistler Blower is someone who has specific knowledge of wrong doing and brings it to light.

Anon has no such specific knowledge other than what was reported and is already in the light. Yet they decide to go ahead and illegally hack into their system and steal informtion in the hopes of finding more evidence.

Nope. I am just playing the same trick that has been played a lot by politicians, media and corporations. What's wrong using the same logic now to differentiate and highlight the bigotry? Oh I see - you don't like it when it's against your argument.

Nope. I am just playing the same trick that has been played a lot by politicians, media and corporations. What's wrong using the same logic now to differentiate and highlight the bigotry? Oh I see - you don't like it when it's against your argument.

What you have stated above is the philosophy of the coward (perhaps an anonymous one like yourself?) and the slave - yielding to evil without resistance and considering it a virtue. A world that is blind is still better than a world where only the wrongdoers keep their eyes, after all. As a wise man has said,
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

This is what happens when he law fails. Murdoch and his ilk cannot and will not be punished in our current system of law. Vigilante justice is wrong, but it is the only justice left to deal with these folks. If the law would do its job this would not happen.

Although the army did have explicit order not to harm civillians back then.
Interestingly , the whole overblowing of the Tianamen square events has only recently been exposed by wikileaks

As an aside, passive resistance has never accomplished much. Worker's movement didn't achieve 8 hour working time by bending down their heads and politely voicing discontent, for example - they did so by a series of massive strikes.
I expect you are going to come up with Gandhi, but even he didn't.. the British prefer

Blind Crucifier: Let me just put a nail through your hand here...ok, did I get it?One-eyed Victim: [with nail between two fingers] Yeah...err...ouch!Blind Crucifier: And the other hand...did I get that one?One-eyed Victim: Yeah...boy, that stings.Blind Crucifier: And now onto the feet.One-eyed Victim: But your partner already did them.Blind Crucifier: But he didn't tell me.One-eyed Victim: I'm looking right at them...I think I'd know if I had nails through my feet.Blind Crucifier: Okay...well, let that be a

Jurors who have been previously exposed to evidence, and who have encountered it in a context that isn't up to the non-prejudicial standards of the court, wouldn't be considered reasonably neutral. If certain messages are widely spread around in the public because Anonymous thinks their priorities and standards are more important than the prosecutors', then that could indeed make such evidence essentially unusable in court.

You're still missing the point. It's not about how many people knew or didn't know about Simpson, or even about the murders. It's about how much of the specific, detailed evidence in the case was hacked off of servers and made public by an agenda-driven group before a trial even started. Apples and oranges, here, conceptually.

Still not getting the point. In the case of Simpson, we're talking about the leaking of non-public information (coroner's reports, DNA info, etc). Still a bad analogy, regardless. In the case of the News of the World situation, we're talking about the actual content of internal communcations. You don't need to know who Anonymous or Lulzsec are (or care) in order to have seen news coverage of the content of stolen e-mails.

the point i was making is that the jurors they found for the casey anthony case weren't exposed otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to be jurors. they found some, but they had one hell of a hard time finding someone that wasn't already exposed to the case

You're mixing the issues here. The fact that a jury pool has been tainted does not in any way affect the admissability of evidence.

Whether or not the evidence is tainted depends on a few factors. First off, if the evidence is illegally obtained by a third party not under the influence of the authorities, the evidence is not automatically tainted. Chain of custody becomes an important issue, however, since the prosecution would have to pretty much prove that the evidence was not altered by the third party. However, the most important one to this example, I think, would be the exceptions to the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. Namely, whether the authorities would have inevitably discovered these documents in the course of their investigations (assuming full compliance with warrant issued by the court). I don't think there is any way the authoities would NOT serve a warrant for those emails.

There are of course other factors involved in whether the evidence is admissable. But a third party acting completely independently from the authorities acquiring evidence illegally does not make that evidence inadmissable, no matter whether or not it taints the jury pool.[1]

And for what it's worth... without public outcry, it's quite possible that the alleged guilty parties at NOTW would enter a plea bargain and have the evidence suppressed (legally or extra-legally, they have a ton of influence). It's why this is such a big scandal... that's exactly what they've been doing for years. Public access to the information is the foundation of the only weapons we have against the government-corporate-media complex[2] that subverts the US democracy.

[1] IANAL. If you want a real legal analysis, consult a real lawyer. YMMV. Half of what I know about law I learned from Perry Mason, Colombo, and Law and Order. The other half comes from researching topics relevant to slashdot discussion on the internet. Do not use my post as legal advice. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

[2] I don't think I'm a conspiracy theorist, no matter how much that line makes me sound like one. It's obvious to me that US Legislators are far more beholden to the companies that pay their election bills and hire them once they are out of office than they are to the public; especially so for media companies, who by-and-large control what information the public has.

Who cares? The courts have already proven that they have no teeth against corporations. Hopefully this will hit them where it really hurts by demonstrating what a heap of shitheels these people are and they lose massive business which will impair their ability to buy political power in the future.

That's not how it works in the US, I dunno about the UK (I assume you're from the US due to your spelling of defense).

If the authorities made no effort to induce the illegal acquisition of the evidence, then it would still be admissable in US court AFAIK. The evidence if only tainted if the authorities, or someone acting at their behest (not a third-party with no link to the authorities), performs an illegal source. Chain of custody would be an issue, I would think, because it would have to be proven (more or less) that the emails were not altered after being lifted from NOTW's servers.

*I know this from watching Perry Mason, Columbo, and Law & Order reruns; IANAL; YMMV; if you want legal advice consult a real lawyer; Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

That's a more or less correct reading, based upon your exposure. However, there would be no chain of custody here because it went from the defendants, to a third party (Lulzsec) and then (presumably) to the authorities. (Proper chain of custody would be something like: scene of the crime -> lab technician -> detective -> prosecutor.) Instead, a prosecutor can take these emails along with additional evidence to get a warrant for the originals, thereby getting a "clean" set of evidence. The clean

Good point, that's how Batman is able help win legit convictions: he's not acting on authorization of the police, so when he leaves the criminals at the crime scene bundled up with the evidence, Gotham City can use all they found in court.

Well, I'm pretty sure my analysis is correct... but not 100% certain... so I put the disclaimer there to draw attention to the fact that I might very well be wrong, and to entice responses from people who could correct me if I am indeed wrong.

You mean the investigations that Scotland Yard has already swept under the rug and tried to kill several times? Yeah, we wouldn't want to compromise those thorough investigations by competent, unbiased police officers. Shit, I heard they're going to put Sherlock Holmes on it, just the make sure that Scotland Yard's unblemished reputation in this matter is upheld.

I am much more interested in seeing LulzSec become bedfellows with the government. Also, wikileaks. Once they start using information from these sources, the establishment must admit they do society some good. Both organizations while operating illegally are operating on moral grounds: that truth and fairness prevail. Meanwhile we have the legitimate government continually hiding information that is "not in the best interest" (according to them) for people to know. Who is worse? Well absent perfectly trans

Pay back is a bitch. As others have mentioned this may not be the best thing for the criminal investigations, but it will be interesting to see how News Corps responds to this since it was apparently ok for them (a private entity) to tap other private entities' phones and e-mails.

Considering the irrational hate and fear, is now up to physical attacks against Murdoch. I'm sure that people are a-okay with things like this too.

Yep and good job people. You want to suck up to a partisan ideology. That's fine. You want to take your partisan ideology to the next step? Well that's okay too. You want to keep going and physically assault people because you don't like their business? You're just as fucked up as the person you claim to be railing against.

I am not saying that this was a good thing, just that "it couldn't have happened to a nicer company". Personally I hope it affect the prosecution of these cases as it would be nice to see a perp walk for some executives for once who are actively trying to screw people.

Yea I'm sure the Wiki-leaks information just magically appeared. People have been referring this latest episode as "phone hacking" which is bullshit and anyone who considers this "hacking" should turn in their geek card in immediately. People just didn't change their default voicemail passwords and got owned. This is also pretty common on luggage locks so you better get to changing them in case the someone short stops your baggage looking for juicy info to post on the front page. This type of illegal access

When are they going to hack the US federal government and spread information far and wide about the Obama admin's gun running program(aka fast and the furious or project gunrunner), and attempt to violate the 2nd amendment. I'm going to guess never, but people will happily froth at the mouth over Murdoch when their own government was complicit in killing people, and enabling mexican cartels getting fire arms.

If your breaking the law by hacking them, whose to say that what you released is even real? Whenever you commit the same crime to expose a crime you lose all credibility.
Fighting ethical misconduct by committing your own misconduct gains nothing! You end up being as big a piece of excrement as the people you say your trying to expose. Looking forward to hearing about more arrests. At News Corp International and members of Anonymous! Knock ! Knock!

Civil Rights protesters can't be trusted -- If they're breaking the law by riding in the front of buses or participating in illegal protests speaking out the very laws that make such things illegal, or performing their "duty as a statesman" to overthrow an oppressive government (as mentioned in their original Declaration of Independence), then they can clearly NEVER be Trusted!

Are you now or have you ever been in violation of any law? Aha! Your vehicle exceeded the mandated speed limit! Your words are meaningless to me now!

Also: I do not abide by laws that are unjust, or logic that is flawed. Nor do I wait idly for the next blow from my assailant's fist.

Because maintaining the moral high-ground by spreading the good word based upon what little we know resulted in keeping HADOPI, the PROTECT IP act, the PATRIOT act, and DMCA down, right? It's what's going to keep ACTA from being forced into reality? The moral high ground is putting down the corruption in the two party system? What has smiling and taking it actually won us?
And if that's not a solid enough argument, I have this thought in parting: If what they're doing is so bad, why can I not help but smil

ohkay buddy. put down the booze or the pills or whatever.. gonzo journalism is separated from Newscorp's by _intent_. Are you here for the truth, or do you have the "truth" and merely need to make some facts up to support it? Think newscorp would publish something that didn't corroborate their pre-established position? Even wikileaks's publishing included the fact the the gov. wasn't all guns and evil, they merely published not editorialized, and that's a difference.

If that's the case, then the U.K. needs legal reform. After all, you shouldn't be able to escape the repercussions of your actions by pretending to be someone else and talking about them. That'd be a huge legal loophole.

it's the "fine" i have a problem with - people need to be responsible for their actions.. even if they are working under the orders of others in their job.. if they break the law they need to go to jail

i know there is problem under the military chain of command for this - but when it comes to corporations there should be zero questions.

Yes it will. If the emails are copied and made available to the public, the police have "probable cause" to look at the originals within NI. From there it's a short step to the DPP, but if history shows us anything it will not go anywhere, though not because of the Anon/Lolz actions.

Why is that hard to believe? It's not the case that it's suddenly become easier to hack servers, the issue is that more people have the knowledge required to do so (and that old vulnerabilities are left unpatched). I mean, some of the hacks have been basic SQL injection or URL vulnerabilities that any competent programmer would know how to avoid. Those crappy systems have been in place for a while, people are just now starting to exploit them for the hell of it. It could have been going on all this time by groups that weren't announcing that they were doing it, like the Chinese government.

I mean, consider this: when Citibank got "hacked" a while ago, and had account details stolen, do you know what the vulnerability was? The URL of the account page looked something like this:

www.citibank.com/my_account.asp?id=<your credit card number here>

All they did was change the number and, voila, it turns out that Citibank was not bothering to authorize the logged-in user to view the given account. Once you were logged in, you could view any account. That's not exactly world-class security, that's something that most kids on the w3schools forum could warn you about. It's an embarrassment that a financial company like Citibank would pay to have something like that built by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

The depressing reality is that most security money these days is spent filling out paperwork, and getting exemptions where you don't meet the standards. That coupled with the fact that there's simply much, much, more stuff online now, makes hacking easier.

That post was too long (so I treated it just like any article on/. and didn't read it), so here's a synopsis:
* Alaska has a Chupacabra, but it's in the water (native Alaskans refer to it as Chupacabrosaurus or Cadborosaurus).
* No one has actually seen it but some video may exist (no one knows what's on the video so an Alaskan Chupacabra can't be ruled out).
* The fact that no one has seen it proves it is not only hiding but intelligent.
* Calls to Alaska's Bigfoot have not been returned proving an Alaska